If guns come before mental health, that’s just crazy

   We interrupt non-stop coverage about what happens during an NFL national anthem to bring news that actually might matter.

   (By the way, ending that national anthem crisis is simple, says my wife: Stop televising it. Three national annoyances go away at once: pop stars butchering it, sports stars protesting it, and media fixating on it.)

   Now, as promised, a matter that actually affects lives:

   While lawmakers of both parties are standing to salute a good idea to address mental health, one man has been criticized for taking a knee – kneeling toward the gun lobby.

   That would be Texas Sen. John Cornyn.

Cornyn promoting a mental health bill that has supporters in both parties. However, his inclination to combine gun matters with mental health matters threatens the very things everyone else supports.

   The legislation would result in more psychiatric beds, something the nation sorely needs and both parties support. It also would signify a shift away from treating prisons as America's mental hospitals of choice.

   The most amazing thing to report is that the House of Representatives supports this.

   Yes, that House. The governing body which has done nothing of consequence since supplying the chips for National Salute to Guacamole Day.

   Believe it: The House overwhelmingly passed a measure in July to increase psychiatric beds and do better for the mentally ill. It was seen as the Republican response to Newtown-style, Aurora-style killings committed by mentally ill individuals.

   "Our mental health system in this country is a failure," said Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., the House bill's sponsor, "and this is one of those times when we're not gathered for a moment of silence, but a time of action."

   Ah, yes. Moments of silence after mass murders. Another matter of pompous pointlessness.

   So, how could guns have any bearing at all on mental health legislation? Here's how.

   A Cornyn-sponsored bill in the Senate, which would do many of the things approved by the House, has gun-related language that could sap Democratic support and kill it.

   For one, it would require a judge's order to ban someone from buying guns due to mental illness. For another, it would allow people previously committed for mental illness to purchase a gun as soon as a judge's commitment order expires.

   Why include these combustible matters in proposal for treating the mentally ill?

   Cornyn did it for the very reason Mitch McConnell recently said there will be no new Supreme Court justice until the National Rifle Association says it approves of the nominee. Cornyn is doing what too many lawmakers do, scratching the NRA's every itch.

   (By the way, Sen. McConnell, the voters might have something to say in November about this court matter if they take away the Senate majority that places the NRA in such a position.)

   In this dust-up, we see the abomination of attaching polarizing riders against contraception and for flying the Confederate flag at VA cemeteries to legislation that almost everyone agrees is needed. That's been the problem with a Zika funding bill. The Republicans say we need it, but loaded it up with poison pills certain to draw the president's veto. Last week, consequently, the Centers for Disease Control said it was just about to run out of Zika funding.

   Back to mental health: It is encouraging to report that Cornyn says he'll consider dropping the gun initiatives so legislation can advance.

   That would mean that Congress – this Congress – actually agreed to do something that would benefit the American people. How about that?

   We now return you to your previously scheduled distraction.

   Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Tell us about that illegal scourge, Mr. Builder

        He was in a pinch, on a deadline, and short on cash. So the employer hired undocumented workers.

Working day and night, they demolished a building that the employer ultimately would replace with a structure that would make him a lot of money.

When the workers complained about pay and dangerous conditions, the employer threatened to have them deported.

That employer: Donald Trump.

Reporting on this (how many of his supporters know this?), Time magazine quotes Trump's own associate as saying the Polish nationals doing the groundwork that preceded Trump Tower in 1980 were paid "starvation wages."

Illegal immigration is a scourge, unless it makes you money.

Listening to profiteers like Trump painting those horror stories about illegal immigration, it sounds to me like those high-profile sorts who, strumming Bibles to denounce homosexuals, later are found to be batting on both sides of the plate.

Hypocrites.

Adlai Stevenson had this to say about Trump's kind of politicians: The type who would "chop down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation."

It is sadly fascinating to see the ranks of the most alarmist people when it comes to this issue.

Recently the governing board of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department rejected a proposal by the federal government to use the shuttered Corsicana State Home for housing Central American children who came into the country illegally.

The objective: temporary shelter for the children until their relatives can take them.

         Leaders in the city of Corsicana supported the idea as a way to use a facility whose closing hurt the local economy. But Texas Republican leaders, led by Gov. Greg Abbott, were more interested in posturing. They dare not be seen as capitulating to President Obama about anything, particularly immigration.

Pompously, Republican State Sen. Brian Birdwell said he would not "validate the mass influx of immigrants" manifest in this proposal, denouncing the president's "willful malfeasance" of immigration law. Harrumph.

        Big words, small attitudes.

Of course, what this president is doing with these children, as with Syrian refugees, is what all developed countries do in times of humanitarian crisis. They help.

Texas Republicans know what Trump knows: Illegal immigrants are a serious problem unless big business can exploit them. And if they're dark-skinned adolescents, who wants them?

A newly released Gallup study of Trump supporters finds this: Those who are the most strident about immigration are the least likely to encounter an immigrant in their neighborhoods. In other words, they know not what they would demonize.

In the case of Latino immigrants, says the study, individuals in areas with heavy Hispanic populations, particularly close to the border, are more hospitable to them, and less hospitable toward Trump.

Reports Gallup, "Those who view Trump favorably are more likely to be found in white enclaves -- racially isolated zip codes."

In other words, the likelihood that these people would ever encounter, or ever be impacted by, undocumented individuals is slim to none.

These Trump supporters are living a white-flight fantasy but have no reason to flee.

         We don't need Gallup to tell us that in whatever case of stereotyping and alarmist generalizations, whether the objects of the generalizations are Mexicans, blacks, homosexuals, Muslims, or anyone else from a world of difference, people resolved to live in that world are more understanding.

Those who never interact with Muslims, who hardly ever see a black person except on ESPN, or who for all they know are surrounded by 100 percent pure churchgoing heterosexuals — those oblivious sorts are the most inclined to fear them.

         So, Mr. Trump, when you build that wall, will you be using Poles? Mexicans? Syrians? Whom?

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Above the law? No, profiling is below it

    More sad tidings for all you "law and order" types, particularly you candidates and elected sorts who think shortcuts to order are what law entails.

   Another court has affirmed what long has been settled: police profiling is unlawful.

   One twist: In this case, the traffic-stop criterion deemed illegal and pernicious isn't the color of a person's skin but of his or her license plates.

   A federal appeals court ruled that Kansas police could not stop cars simply because they come from states with legal marijuana: Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Oregon and Washington D.C.

   How will Kansas keep order?

   How, indeed, with jail-cell quotas to meet and town budget shortfalls to mend.

   Granted, this could just be a matter of news traveling slowly. When the Constitution was ratified, more than one state thought it had cast the deciding vote. It's possible, then, that Kansas has yet to hear that the 14th Amendment has, indeed, been ratified -- in 1868.

   Or maybe Kansas didn't hear about something more recent, the 2013 federal appeals court ruling in Floyd vs. the City of New York that so-called "stop and frisk" tactics violated the due process and equal protection clauses of that amendment.

    One guess as to what criteria police were using in that case.

    The "law and order" crowd has much to say about Black Lives Matter. Critics portray the movement a one-trick pony, showing up only to exploit highly volatile, and often murky, cases such as the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. So focused, say those critics, the movement is guilty of inciting violence against police.

     But the fundamental atrocity that underpins Black Lives Matter isn't that. The fundamental atrocity is in lesser offenses.

     In Austin, what a police officer did to school teacher Breaion King was alarming enough – throwing her to the ground during a videotaped traffic stop. However, what echoes in that community are the words of an officer lecturing King that white people fear black people because of "violent tendencies."

     As with any gesture, it's the thought that counts.

In Arizona's Maricopa County, Sheriff Joe Arpaio seems always to be one step ahead of the 14th Amendment.

    Arpaio has turned up his nose at a federal judge's dictates to remedy a history of racial profiling. Now the U.S Justice Department has taken over the case with the prospect that Arpaio, seeking his seventh term in office, could be held in contempt of court.

    A host of cities, by contrast, are taking these matters seriously.

Denver police recently unveiled a plan to record racial data for all stops made by police. This will be a useful means of making sure that "driving while black" is not a crime in Denver as it has become in far too many cities.

    So, are black people, as that Austin cop appears to believe, asking for the uneven enforcement of the law that they receive?

Data from Rhode Island, Connecticut, South Carolina and Illinois say no, that they are being unfairly singled out.

    Those states have done what Denver plans: maintain racial data relative to traffic stops. In each state, police were more apt to stop blacks than whites, though the New York Times reports, police "consistently found drugs, guns or other contraband more often if the driver was white."

    Even if the shoe were on the other foot. Even if officers' race-based suspicious were justified, unequal enforcement of the law is illegal. End of discussion. One would think.

    Long-time newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.